I thought the article linked below was not bad
http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/cult-crossfit (I’m sure being MH that will get put down :rolleyes:) it ends
[i]IN MY 3 MONTHS OF DOING CROSSFIT THREE times a week, the closest I came to barfing was a 1,000-meter race on rowing machines. For some reason I really wanted to win, despite the fact that one of my opponents had extreme performance advantages. I didn’t puke, but I also didn’t win.
I did, however, lose 7 pounds in 90 days. That would’ve been a great result if I hadn’t started at 141 pounds. The last thing I wanted was to end up skinnier. Nobody at my CrossFit gym knew about my weight loss, or cared. At no point was I asked what my goals were. If nothing else, I hoped that all the squats, deadlifts, and Olympic lifts would put some contours onto my tragically flat ass. Alas, my buttocks remained more or less the same.
I also discovered that I’m not the best candidate for group workouts. To my surprise, I was easily coerced into adopting a competitive mindset. It didn’t matter if my rivals were nice middle-aged women; I was driven by the need to crush them. At first I thought it was good to move so far out of my comfort zone, but it didn’t take long for me to realize why I’d been so comfortable in that zone. It wasn’t just the intensity or the inappropriate competitive zeal that put me off CrossFit. The endless affirmations—all the clapping and grating exclamation points after “You’re doing a great job!”—brought out my inner misanthrope.
The last straw came when I found myself in a class of 12, mostly women. They’d all finished, but I still had 3 sets to go. There’s something uniquely humiliating about trying to squeeze out a fifth round of 10 pullups, completely red-faced and fatigued, with a group of women yelling encouragement. I finished 2 minutes after my nearest rival, stumbled through a forest of high-fives, and then went out the door and never came back.
A month later I bumped into a neighbor who’d joined CrossFit Westside around the same time I did.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t go to CrossFit anymore,” I answered.
She was slack-jawed, speechless.
“You’re still going, I take it?”
“Hell, yeah!” she said. “I’m an instructor now. It’s the thing I love most in the world. Well, maybe my husband is first, but CrossFit is a close second, and the gap is getting narrower.”
I laughed, but she assured me she wasn’t kidding. It’s like a cult crossed with a pyramid scheme, and the base is always widening. It brought me back to my first conversation about CrossFit with Becky, my old girlfriend. There’s something about CrossFit that makes some people want to post videos of themselves doing pullups—while that “something” drives others like me away.
But if nothing else, the earnest zeal I saw in my 3 months of WODs gave me hope. Maybe someday I’ll find a fitness regimen that hooks me the way CrossFit hooked them.
What have you heard about Zumba?[/i]